It's going to ring the doorbell and run.
Morning Radio
I missed the beginning of the interview, but NPR's Morning Edition was interviewing somebody who was opposed to Obama's plan for health care reform.
The guy was exciteable and defensive, and really really contradictory.
For example, the guy said (I'm paraphrasing) that whenever government competes with private business, it always does a bad job. He cited as examples, the post office and Amtrak.
Look, Amtrak may not be the best-run thing in the country, but it seems to be doing much better than its competition. In fact, I don't know who Amtrak's competition is. Do you? In any event, to the extent that Amtrak has not fared well, it is because people don't use trains much.
And the post office? Don't get me started. What the hell is wrong with the post office? As Jon Stewart recently said, a guy comes to your house, takes something that you wrote, puts it on a plane, and it gets delivered to the house of some guy in Montana, whose name and address I scrawled by hand on the front of the envelope – all for 44 cents. No forms to fill out; no standing in line; and cheap. How is the that the model for ineffecient government?
Anyway, then this guy in the interview, after attacking government businesses, started touting Medicare, and how it needs to be preserved because it's so great. But then he also says he wants to cut Medicare.
The interviewer (Steve Inskeep, I think) picked up on this obvious contradiction, and put it to the guy. That's when the fun began.
I was really curious who the interviewee was. It was in the NPR studio, so I figured it wasn't a random teabagger protester.
Turns out it was the head of the Republican Party: Chairman Michael Steele.
Oy.
The folks at Talking Points Memo apparently heard the same interview this morning:
On Morning Edition today, Michael Steele gets tied in knots trying to explain how the GOP (or maybe just Steele himself?) wants to preserve Medicare against cuts, while also cutting Medicare and opposing government-run health care programs in general. It's an impossible dance for anyone, but Steele is burdened with two left feet.
Hard to believe this guy really is the head of a major American political party.
Listen to the whole interview (link):
UPDATE: Think Progress has more….
Teddy Hagiography
Last night was literally the first evening in months where I had no rehearsals, no performances, no auditions, no theatre-related meetings, etc. In other words, it was the first evening in months where I could veg in front of the TV.
Man, what a bleak oasis.
With nothing to grab my interest, I gravitated to the news channels, where there was, not surprisingly, an endless parade of bobbleheads talking about Ted Kennedy.
I like Kennedy, but I don't like bobbleheads. Some of it was a little over the top. Keith Olbermann, for example, openly mused that Teddy might be the "greatest" Kennedy of them all. (He wasn't; Bobby was. Had Bobby lived, the country and the world would be a much better place today — you wouldn't even recognize it. I'm convinced of that.)
CNN, however, ran an HBO documentary called "Teddy: In His Own Words". It was just a series of news clips and interviews, arranged chronologically, from and about Ted Kennedy. No narration. It was interesting and informative. I didn't know, for example, that President Nixon had ordered surveillance of Kennedy in order to get the goods on him (this came from a Nixon tape). He wanted Kennedy's secret service protection to include informatives who would tip the White House if Kennedy was doing something immoral.
Nixon was such a skank.
But PBS aired a re-run of The American Experience. The subject matter was The Kennedys. It made sense — after all, Ted Kennedy didn't just die yesterday; the Kennedy dynasty died.
There they are. Joe, Rose, and their nine kids. With Teddy's death (coming on the heals of Eunice's death a few weeks ago), they're all gone now.
The American Experience: The Kennedys is a fascinating documentary, and if they replay it in the next few days, I highly recommend it.
The last chapter of the documentary is called "The Ninth Child", and it focuses on Teddy. Even though I had seen the documentary before, I was struck by one particular comment from an RFK advisor. He noted the incredible pressure that was placed on Teddy after Bobby was killed. I'm paraphrasing, but he said something like this:
Imagine what it is like to be a person where if you don't become President of the United States, you are considered a failure. And on top of that, you're the patriarch to 16 kids whose fathers have fallen at the hands of assassins. I can't even begin to comprehend what that must have been like. The personal strain and pressure and self-doubt….
That was where Teddy found himself in 1969.
It doesn't excuse the alcoholism and reckless behavior, but it certainly makes it logical.
Texas (Of Course) Executes Innocent Man
Take a long look at the picture:
That's Amber Willingham and her father, Cameron Todd Willingham.
In 1992,the Willingham house caught fire. Amber and her two sisters perished.
Cameron, the father, was charged with murder. He is the only person in history charged with murder where fire was the weapon.
There wasn't much evidence against him. He was convicted largely on the testimony of Texas arson "experts" who claimed that there were twenty indicators of arson.
By 2004, Willington has exhausted his appeals. Much progress had been made in arson investigation techniques, and many (if not all) of the techniques used by the arson experts at Willingham's trial had fallen into disrepute.
For example, "crazed glass" — cracked but not shattered glass – was once thought to be an indicator of the use of a liquid accelerant. But "crazed glass" is now classified by fire investigation experts as an "Old Wives Tale." Crazed glass can be caused by a liquid accellerant, it can also be caused by the rapid chilling of hot glass by water used to extinguish a fire.
"Crazed glass" was only one of the indicators used to convict Willingham, but the other so-called indicators are largely myth-based.
Despite that fact the myths of his alleged arson were well-known by 2004, Cameron Todd Willingham was executed by the state of Texas on February 17, 2004. His last words included:
Yeah. The only statement I want to make is that I am an innocent man – convicted of a crime I did not commit. I have been persecuted for 12 years for something I did not do.
The story doesn't end there. Following some high-profile forensic screw-ups, the Texas Legislature in 2005 created a commission to investigate lab error, negligence, and misconduct among forensic experts.
Their first major review was the Willingham case. The commission hired an outside firm to review the case materials and issue a report. Their investigator, Craig Beyler, just released his findings, and his report is bonechillingly frank:
In a withering critique, a nationally known fire scientist has told a state commission on forensics that Texas fire investigators had no basis to rule a deadly house fire was an arson — a finding that led to the murder conviction and execution of Cameron Todd Willingham.
***
Among Beyler's key findings: that investigators failed to examine all of the electrical outlets and appliances in the Willinghams' house in the small Texas town of Corsicana, did not consider other potential causes for the fire, came to conclusions that contradicted witnesses at the scene, and wrongly concluded Willingham's injuries could not have been caused as he said they were.
The state fire marshal on the case, Beyler concluded in his report, had "limited understanding" of fire science. The fire marshal "seems to be wholly without any realistic understanding of fires and how fire injuries are created," he wrote.
The marshal's findings, he added, "are nothing more than a collection of personal beliefs that have nothing to do with science-based fire investigation."
Way to go, Texas.
Health Insurance And The Free Market
Tthose opposed to health care reform do so because they want to keep "their" insurance. (Forget for a moment that under the Obama health care public option, you can keep "your" insurance).
But how many people can actually claim that "their" health insurance is actually theirs? I mean, did they select it? Was it their choice?
I buy insurance for my car; I get to pick the insurance company. But health care? No, I'm on the plan offered by my employer. As are most workers.
In fact, most of us don't choose our insurer. Twelve percent of us are on Medicare. Thirteen percent are on Medicaid. Fifteen percent are uninsured. And 53.4 percent get our health-care coverage from our employers.
This is one of the reasons why the free market hasn't worked in the field of health care. The real consumers of the product aren't the ones who buy it — we don't get to pick and choose our insurer, like we do with auto insurance.
And what about employers? Well, they don't have much incentive for helath care cost control. Health insurance is part and parcel of employee compensation. If employers were to pay lower premiums, that just obligates them to play higher wages…. and vice versa. It's a zero-sum game.
So as the proxy consumers of health insurance, employers don't have a stake in the matter.
In other words, in the free market of health insurance, there is no "invisible hand" that keeps prices low and benefits high. There's no consituency for cost control. Which may explain why health care costs are so ridiculously high in the first place.
All the more reason why a public option should be available.
Nation Panicked By Ominous Music
Ominous Music Heard Throughout U.S. Sends Nation Into Panic
The chyrons are the best….
If Gay Marriage Destroys Marriage…..
then why does Massachusetts have the lowest divorce rate in the entire country?
It's been five year since Massachusetts recognized marriage equality, long enough to actually get some data on its effects (if any)
Before I go on, let's have a quote-a-thon:
"Homosexuals are not monogamous. They want to destroy the institution of marriage. It [ same-sex marriage ] will destroy marriage. It will destroy the Earth." – James Dobson, Focus on the Family, October 2004 speaking at a rally for OK GOP Senate candidate Tom Coburn
"This is only the beginning, if we allow this [ same sex marriage ] to happen we will, in effect, have destabilized the basic institution of our society, which is marriage between a man and a woman" – Brian Camenker, President of the Parents' Rights Coalition, as quoted by MassNews, March 2000
"There is a master plan out there from those who want to destroy the institution of marriage." – Senator Wayne Allard (R-CO) during the July 2004 U.S. Senate debate on the "Federal Marriage Amendment".
"The sexual revolution led to the decoupling of marriage and procreation; same-sex 'marriage' would pull them completely apart, leading to an explosive increase in family collapse…." – Charles Colson, Christianity Today, June 2004
"Marriage is the union between a man and a woman is a truth known to each one of us already, and any attempt to allow same-sex marriages is a detriment to the family unit and hurts our state and nation." – Texas Governor Rick Perry, in an August 2005 mass email to supporters
Let's see how that destruction-of-marriage thing is coming along.
The CDC compiled divorce data state by state and recently released it… you can read it here (PDF) The data covers 2000-2007, so you have about 3 years of data where gay marriage was legal in Massachusetts.
The upshot? Massachusetts still has the lowest divorce rate in the country. In fact it went down from 2.5 in 2004 to 2.2 the folling year (after gay marriagees were allowed). Provisional data from 2008 indicates that the Massachusetts divorce rate has dropped from 2.3 per thousand in 2007 down to about 2.0 per thousand for 2008. (For comparison purposes, the current rate for North Carolina is twice as large: 4.0 per thousand people, and the national rate is 7.3).
So what does this mean? To get a sense of perspective consider that the last time the US national divorce rate was 2.0 per thousand (people) was 1940.
Hmmm. And you would think that conservatives would love things being like they were in 1940.
Listen Folks, If You Are Going To Use Facebook, Learn The Difference Between Wall Posts And Email
Learn from Tracy:
BTW, Tracy… aren't you engaged?
The Coburn Health Care Plan
CNN’s Rick Sanchez aired a segment from a health care town hall where a weeping constituent explained to Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) her prblems. The woman in the clip struggles to even speak through her tears, but she explains to her right-wing senator that her husband has traumatic brain injuries. Their family's private insurer, she said, won't cover some of his treatments. "We left the nursing home," she said, "and they told us we are on our own." She breaks down, pleading for help.
Coburn's response is fascinating and illuminating. First, Coburn told her that his office would try to assist her individually. Then he added:
"But the other thing that's missing in this debate is us as neighbors helping people that need our help…The idea that the government is the solution to our problems is an inaccurate, a very inaccurate statement."
Here's the video:
First of all, Coburn runs over his own argument. If Coburn's office is going to help this woman, then the government is acting as a solution, at least in her case. Why, then, should people like Coburn seek to prevent government from helping in every case? If not the government, then who?
Coburn would say, "Well, the neighbors". That's a sweet sentiment, and naturally, I don't disagree. It would be nice if we as a society would help out each other, and take care of the least fortunate of us. But sometimes that is hard to do, especially when virtually everybody needs help.
This is where government comes in. In fact, this is what government is. Government, at all levels — federal, state, local — is how we help our neighbors. We are the government. Government is the place where we come together as a people and actually fix these problems en masse. Because relying solely on charity or the good graces of others only goes so far, and obviously, that alone hasn't worked when it comes to health care. The woman is a testament to that.
Coburn's position, ehld by an alarming number of conservative Americans, makes no sense. As Digby writes:
Americans refuse to pay an extra penny in taxes to make sure that they and their neighbors don't go broke and wind up without any support if they get sick. But we are supposed to rely on our neighbors to come in and change our bedpans for us?
RIP Edward Kennedy
In the 1930's, Joe Kennedy knew one of his sons would be President. That future president, everyone assumed, was to be smart, handsome, and charismatic Joe Kennedy, Jr. But Joe Jr. was shot down and killed in WWII. All eyes fell to John.
Joe Kennedy lived long enough to see JFK become President, as well as the younger brother Bobby become Attorney General.
But then, in the shadows, there was another Kennedy son, comprised it seemed of leftover parts from his older brothers. As Kennedys go, nobody expected much from Teddy. Sure, he got into Harvard, but, being a Kennedy, one has to try awfully hard not to get into Harvard. But once there, he didn't excel. He didn't seem to have the Kennedyesque quality. He was, in essence, George Bush — living off of the family name.
So when he decided to run for public office in 1962 — the U.S. Senate — his older brothers urged him against it. There stood a real chance that the young Teddy, age 30, might lose. Worse still, he might win and be an embarrassment.
Well, he ran and he won… and sure, he won only because of his last name.
Then something happened. He got in a plane crash and was hospitalized for several months. He took that time to bone up on the issues and become knowledgeable. Being in the hospital, one of his pet issues became health care.
Granted, he was still a Kennedy, with all the Kennedy personal failings. Womanizing, drinking, etc. This all came to a head in 1969 when he drove off a bridge on Chappaquidick, a small island off Martha's Vineyard. The death of his car companion, a young campaign worker named Mary Jo Kepechne, was controversial enough, but the fact that Ted waited several hours to report the incident (having hurriedly gone instead to seek counsel with political advisers first) was what alienated many voters against him.
After Chappaquiddick, many said that Teddy could never be president. By this time (the late 60's), he was the last Kennedy of his generation — both JFK and Bobby had been assassinated. In 1980, Teddy proved the nay-sayers right; he challenged a very unpopular incumbent President Jimmy Carter, and failed to even get the Democratic nomination.
But then a funny thing happened. Senator Edward Kennedy found himself in a unique position: a man could go no higher politically, but who was virtually guaranteed a lifelong post in the Senate (because the Massachusetts people were never going to vote him out). This freed him up from lobbyists and others on whom other politicians rely for campaign donations. And it allowed him to make a strong commitment to public service.
He relished it, and went after it with gusto.
That, of course, is Ted Kennedy's strongest legacy — his unflinching support for social justice, be it in the form of civil rights, education or health care. Unrestrained by the politics of getting re-elected and free from catering to special interests, he did what most of us would want our elected leaders to do: he did good.
Anyone who grew up with 120 miles of Boston during the past 4 decades, as I did, knows that you can't swing a dead cat without knocking over a couple of Kennedys. I don't know how many times I've seen him speak — as a visiting lecturer, at some commencement, in a campaign for someone (it probably helped that I went to college with his daughter). I even talked to him briefly once in a Copley Plaza restaurant (he was very gregarious).
He may not have had a stellar personal life, but when it comes to public service, he is the role model. Like his brothers, he was born into privilege. Like his brothers, he believed that being graced with such privilege obligates one to give back to the community, a moral tenet that seems to be lost on the Wall Street CEOs of today.
Sadly, he was never to realize his lifelong dream of universal, affordable health care, and his death yesterday from brain cancer, while expected, comes at an ironic time. I don't think it will change the scope of the health care debate, but someday, Kennedy's dream will come true. It may be another generation, but when it happens, I am confident that he will be recognized. As Kennedy himself said exactly one year ago today:
“This is the cause of my life. New hope that we will break the old gridlock and guarantee that every American – north, south, east, west, young, old – will have decent, quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privilege.”
I've always had a soft spot for Ted Kennedy as a person. I cannot imagine what it must have been like all those years to be the Kennedy king, singlehandedly carrying the mantle of the family name whose members included JFK and Bobby Kennedy. I mean, that's a pretty steep curve that he's been graded on. As Time's Joe Klein writes:
He was scared catatonic, of course. Scared of death, obviously. There was no reason to believe, in a nation of nutballs, that he would be allowed to continue, unshot. But he was frightened of more profound things as well — overwhelmed by his own humanity in the face of his brothers' immortality, convinced that he'd never measure up, that Joe and Jack and Bobby had been the best of the Kennedys.
You can actually feel that weight being thrown on Ted's back here, as he speaks one of the best eulogies I've ever heard, on the occasion of his brother Bobby's funeral:
It was probably worse after JFK, Jr. died. It seemed clear that Ted Kennedy was the end of the dynasty, and for the first time in my entire life, I now live in a world that lacks a Kennedy on the national political scene. Rather strange.
The last of Joe and Rose Kennedy's nine children, Ted died 14 days after his sister Eunice.
For those who despair that Kennedy's absence might make the country an unhealthier place, remember this:
“For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.” —Senator Edward M. Kennedy. 1932-2009.
UPDATE: The reaction from the right blogosphere is entirely predictable. Much call for respect and all that, but the unwashed masses (the commenters) can't seem to resist the "burn in Hell, Teddy" rhetoric.
Another meme is emerging from the right — they think it is inappropriate that Kennedy's funeral be some sort of tribute to the things that Kennedy cared about — like social justice, civil rights, and health care. "It's about the man", they say, harkening to the Paul Wellstone funeral many years ago.
Such concern trolling is both funny and upsetting. Of course it is about the man, but you can't separate the man from the things that the man stood for, fought for, and believed in his entire life.
UPDATE: Kennedy debates Nixon in 1971 about health care. Cronkite, who also passed recently, does the introduction…
Thomas Paine Weighs In On Torture
GOP Congressman Peter King — the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee — had said this today regarding Eric Holder's decision to investigate whether laws were broken by the Bush administration's torture:
"It’s bulls***. It’s disgraceful. You wonder which side they’re on. [It's' a] declaration of war against the CIA, and against common sense…"
Yeah. Well, one can be "not on the side of terrorists" and still condemn the torture of suspected terrorists.
In fact, one should condemn torture if one is on the side of the law. After all, the Supreme Court in Hamdan ruled that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applies to all detainees, including accused Terrorists. And the War Crimes Act makes it a felony to inflict "prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from . . . the threat of imminent death; or the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering. . . ."
The acts mentioned in the IG Report faile the Geneva Conventions and our own War Crimes Act. They therefore are crimes, period. Crimes are technically "crimes against the state", so if one wants to overlook them (as King obviously does), then one wonders whose side he is on.
Just how much does King hate America? Let's go to the wayback machine. In his 1795 essay, which he entitled Dissertations on First Principles of Government, Thomas Paine wrote this as his last paragraph:
An avidity to punish is always dangerous to liberty. It leads men to stretch, to misinterpret, and to misapply even the best of laws. He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.
Can that be any clearer? The measure of our society is measured by how we treat our enemies.
Of course, Paine also wrote in Common Sense that "so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king" and "in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other." And in his Dissertations, he also wrote:
The executive is not invested with the power of deliberating whether it shall act or not; it has no discretionary authority in the case; for it can act no other thing than what the laws decree, and it is obliged to act conformably thereto. . . .
So, in what sense does breaking the law — the law of this country — amount to being pro-America?
McCain Booed For His Opinion That Obama “Respects The Constitution”
Hate it for him, but he's with the wingnut party, so….
By the way, I'm looking here at five law school exams written by Obama for his Constitutional Law class. Dude knows the Constitution.
Can Granny say the same thing?
The Torture
I don't have much to say about this…
WASHINGTON – With just two weeks of training, or about half the time it takes to become a truck driver, the CIA certified its spies as interrogation experts after 9/11 and handed them the keys to the most coercive tactics in the agency's arsenal.
It was a haphazard process, cobbled together in the months following the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington by an agency that had never been in the interrogation business. The result was a patchwork program in which rules kept shifting and the goals often were unclear.
At times, the interrogators went too far, even beyond the wide latitude they were given under the Bush administration's flexible guidelines, according to newly unclassified documents released Monday. Interrogators took the simulated drowning technique of waterboarding beyond what was authorized. Mock executions were held. Family members were threatened. There were hints of rape.
… other than I am not surprised.
The actual IG report is far more graphic than press reports. The highlights include: (1) mock executions; (2) threatened rape of family members; (3) threatened murder of children; (4) kicking and beating a detainee with a metal flashlight to death; (5) threatening naked hooded detainees with power drills; (6) blowing cigar smoke in detainees' faces until they got sick; (7) waterboarding with massive volumes of water far beyond what OLC authorized (to make it "poignant"); (8) stress positions that nearly caused shoulder dislocations; (9) scraping detainees with stiff brushes; (10) choking a detainee with one's bare hands until they nearly pass out; (11) subjecting detainees to extremely cold temperatures and water dousing; (12) "hard takedowns" (sometimes in diapers); and (13) beating detainees with butts of rifles (followed by kicking them).
I understand that Atty General Eric Holder will apppoint a special indpendent prosecutor to look into this, but that the focus of the investigation will be "low-level" CIA interrogators. They will, of course, give the Nuremberg defense: "I was ordered to", and the Yoo torture memos will provide cover for any sort of accountability.
In the end, nothing will happen. No repercussions to anybody, despite the fact that they broke the law.
Glenn Greenwald has the best summary of the IG report.
Remembering 9/11 In The Obama Years
It amazes me what conservatives decide to get in a tizzy about.
The latest? Obama signed into law a measure in April that designated Sept. 11 as a National Day of Service.
OMG!!! Here's how a conservative wrote about this in The American Spectator. This is an actual quote, not — I repeat, not — a parody:
The plan is to turn a "day of fear" that helps Republicans into a day of activism called the National Day of Service that helps the left. In other words, nihilistic liberals are planning to drain 9/11 of all meaning.
And there you have it. To conservatives, 9/11 means "fear" and we should commemorate that day as a "day of fear". And we would, were it not for Obama's desecration.
Never mind that George W. Bush called for community volunteer work on the anniversary of 9/11, and the right didn't find it controversial then. Never mind that victims' families have recommended making 9/11 a national day of service for years.
And besides, if you check out the official web site set up for the day, you'll find that that they're asking people to come up with their own events. So if you don't want to help out at anti-American places like food banks and community gardens, you can organize your own event. A pee-in-your-pants event, if one chooses.